TURN OUT THE LIGHTS THE PARTY’S OVER: ANALYZING THE SOUTHERN WALKOUT AT THE 1860 DEMOCRATIC PARTY CONVENTION USING JAMES CEASER’S PARTY CLASSIFICATIONS
Presented at WPSA Conference
Friday, March 25, 2016
San Diego, California
By
Dustin Guerra,
Christian Community College
and
Darren P. Guerra, Ph.D.
Biola Univeristy
Abraham Lincoln likely would not have been elected president had the Democratic Party not split along sectional lines at the party’s 1860 convention. The Democratic Party was the most important (and perhaps the only) institutional moderating force for the sectional fissures that had been growing for decades leading up to the 1860 election. The party’s split at the 1860 Charleston convention caused a political rift which could not be repaired. With the election of the Republican Lincoln southern states began to secede triggering a series of events that led to the Civil War. Thus, arguably the die was cast for Civil War in Charleston at the Democratic National Convention of 1860. Why wasn’t the Democratic Party able to continue to maintain its cohesiveness as it had through all the compromises of the previous 30 years? How could the party that had mediated sectional strife for decades suddenly rupture and send the United States tumbling headlong into the most deadly conflict in the nation’s history? While the answers to these questions are surely complex, one piece of the answer lies in the Democratic Party’s internal dynamics as they stood in 1860. Valuable insight into these dynamics and the eventual violent separation may be gained by applying the party criteria articulated in James Ceaser’s work Presidential Selection to the major factions in the Democratic Party represented at Charleston. Ceaser, drawing on Tocqueville and historian Richard Hofstader, articulates three party types; the Great Party, the Burkean Party, and the Small Party.[1] In this typology, great parties are not great because their ideas are necessarily good, but their views are termed great because their ideas cut to the very core of the polity. Great parties hold deep seeded views about the fundamental manner in which society should be ordered thus, strong opposition to these parties can lead to great social ruptures such as civil war.[2] This historical analysis will reveal that Southern Democrats pursued a vision of “great” party politics in their efforts to shape the Democratic Party and its platform. In contrast, “small parties” exist simply to gain power and distribute largess and political patronage. In this sense, Northern Democrats tended to act in a manner consistent with a “small” party and as such they provided little principled resistance to the passionate secessionists. Evidence for the applying these classifications to the respective faction will be drawn from actual floor debates of the 1860 Democratic Party Convention in Charleston. It will be shown that Ceaser’s party classifications help reveal the depth and nature of the divisions within the Democratic Party in its convention in Charleston.
Ceaser’s Party Classifications
James Ceaser’s work on presidential selection is a classic treatise on the development and design of the American system for selecting presidential candidates and electing a chief executive.[3] In the midst of this work Ceaser addresses Martin Van Buren’s detailed arguments for promoting a system of party competition whereby potentially dangerous political conflict is institutionalized and transformed into more benign partisan conflict. Parties then serve to blunt dangerous political impulses of the people and simultaneously serve to discipline and restrain presidential candidates from potentially tyrannical or dangerous ambitions.
Again, because great parties in James Ceaser’s typology hold deep seeded views about the fundamental manner in which society should be ordered opposition to these parties can lead to great social ruptures, even civil war.[4] Ceaser notes that the American Founders viewed all parties as great parties and for this reason opposed all partisan politics for they would lead to instability and social upheaval.[5] Again, in contrast, Small parties exist simply to gain power and distribute largess and political patronage. Small parties may “compete under a dim banner of principles” but they essentially have no other goal than acquiring political power within the existing system and distributing that power to their patrons, they are essentially patronage parties.[6] Lastly, Burkean parties by contrast are formed to promote “significant principles” but ones that challenge the existing framework of government or the regime.[7] Burkean parties acknowledge the rules of the election, and while contests may be “intense”, “elevated”, and “spirited” they do not threaten the basic integrity of the existing political system.[8]
Since Ceaser’s party classifications appear in a section outlining Martin Van Buren’s defense of party competition, it is necessary to develop the context within which the classifications are presented. By Ceaser’s account Martin Van Buren was the architect of America’s two party system and party competition. He developed his plan for this two-party system with the intellectual aid of none other than Thomas Jefferson and the practical aid of Andrew Jackson’s electoral success and the emergence of a strong Whig reaction to Jackson’s power and popularity.[9] Van Buren’s plans for an electoral system based on party competition was cemented, appropriately enough, with his election to the Presidency in 1836. Van Buren’s case for party competition rested on essentially three arguments. First, parties would prevent the emergence of dangerous factions built upon the intense popularity of individual candidates who may not wield their power and popularity responsibly. Parties committed to a set of principles would extract concessions from potential candidates and moderate potentially destabilizing behavior and positions of ambitious presidential candidates. By controlling the nomination process ambitious candidates would not be able to simply play on popular passions to gain the nomination but must appeal to party leaders and regulars that they are sufficiently committed to the broad principles and purposes of the party. In short, parties would blunt the potentially dangerous effects of demagoguery and potential threats to constitutionalism from ambitions leaders. Second, parties would moderate and manage electoral conflict by demanding broad consensus on an array of issues and principles. They would also moderate potentially dangerous new ideas by moderating them and co-opting them into evolving party platforms. Third, parties would also serve to avoid the undesirable and potentially dangerous occurrence of elections being decided in the House of Representatives. Within a strong two-party system each party would produce a candidate that would immediately gain the notice and reputation across the country.[10] Parties would then produce two national candidates which in turn would result a clear victory and electoral majority for one candidate and party, thus avoiding the machinations of the House selection process. Thus, on a whole, vigorous two-party competition would provide a valuable moderating influence on American politics. Parties would seek to dampen the ambitious and perhaps tyrannical designs of individual candidates and they would provide institutional means of moderating deep political fissures by channeling such impulses into broader political organizations that were somewhat immune from more strident and narrow factionalism. As will be shown the Democratic party in particular did seem to perform these functions for decades by suppressing sectional divisions and uniting North and South under one party banner.
However, it is upon this second role of Van Buren’s two-party system that he began to experience the intense pressure of the increasingly divisive issue of slavery. Van Buren himself while actively devising and pushing for a stable two-party system ran as a third party candidate by accepting the Free Soil Party nomination in 1848. Why would one so integral in promoting two party competition run under the banner of a third party? Ceaser explains Van Buren’s exception to his own rule this way:
A consensual two-party system was Van Buren’s preference for the normal institutional arrangement of the electoral system; but there may be certain occasions when following normal institutional procedures cannot meet the exigencies of political action. Just as the Founders and Jefferson made allowance for the use of a party even though they were opposed to party competition, so it might be said that Van Buren permitted the creation of a third party even though he subscribed to the doctrine of two-party competition. In both cases, extraordinary circumstances would justify a departure from normal institutional practices.[11]
Van Buren saw his third party run as a means of resting control of the Democratic Party from southerners who had denied him the nomination in 1844 and had begun to make the extension of slavery the guiding principle of the party. Thus, even Northern Democrats were finding that they must restrain or self-censure their anti-slavery sentiments to gain a nomination to the Democratic Party. The party was the device that Van Buren had designed to moderate extreme positions but now, from Van Buren’s point of view, the party machinery was enforcing dangerous positions upon unwilling presidential candidates.[12] Thus, Van Buren’s 1848 run as the Free Soil Party candidate sought to force the Democratic Party to reform itself regarding the issue of slavery. In the end, Van Buren’s two-party competition could not serve as a moderating force if the parties themselves did not maintain the right focus and character. James Ceaser points out that for Van Buren the ideal form of party conflict would likely exist between parties that were some blend of a Burkean Party and a Small party. That is to say, parties that attend to the “low” of individual self-interest of men by promising political largesse, but also advance the “high” of significant principles where best situated to promote stability and good government. This moderate blend of the high and the low in parties might help alleviate the dangerous extremes. As will be shown, by 1860 the two factions within the Democratic Party had come to represent the extremes and thus, rupture at some point became almost inevitable. That point of rupture did indeed come and it came in Charleston in the spring of 1860.
Charleston
In April 1860, the Democratic National Convention convened in Charleston to determine two things: what would the Democratic Party stand for in the coming election and who would represent the Party on the presidential ticket. The delegates came from the Northern free states and the Southern slave states, each with decidedly different perspectives on one important national issue: slavery. The two sides had vowed to their supporters that they would not pander to the other side. For the South, this vow was principle; while for the North their vow was a matter of political life and death. Many of the nation’s politically-minded citizens had predicted that a split of the Party could come from this volatile meeting. And, what would a split cause? Some Southerners were hopeful that if there was a split in the party, no presidential candidate would receive a plurality of the votes, and the presidential race would be forced into the House of Representatives; where surely both Democratic factions would bring a compromise candidate. Others felt that if the party split, then the country could fracture as well. Most of the contemporaries feared that a split of the Democratic Party would be catastrophic for the nation because it would ignite a civil war. Nearly all feared the latter, and yet did not adjust their courses, believing that someone, somewhere, would provide a miracle. Surely cooler heads would prevail and a compromise would come; as had been done time and time again when the issue of slavery had threatened the unity of the nation. Compromises over slavery were as old as the Constitution; and with compromises in 1789, 1820, and 1850, why would the national leadership not be able compromise again?
But the days of compromise were to end at Charleston. The Democratic Party had been the moderating force in the nation. It was the only national institution that could meet the needs of the Southerner and the Northerner. The Whigs had once been powerful, but their demise in the early 1850s led to many single issue parties that appealed to specific portions of the population. The Democrats were a party that had a national constituency that encompassed many issues. In fact, in a speech before the Senate in 1860, Senator Stephen Douglas proclaimed that the Democratic party was “the only party that can save the Union . . . He who attempts to break up that organization looks with complacency to the only alternative which we are told is to follow-to wit: disunion.”[13] Ultimately, if Southern and Northern Democrats, who had been bound together by political self interest for national power, could not find compromise over the issue of slavery, then there certainly was no political room left to compromise at the national level. That is to say, the key moment of disunion came at Charleston for if the Democratic Party could no longer compromise, then certainly neither could the nation.
Throughout the history of the Democratic Party, the Democrats were unifiers of the nation. No self-respecting Southerner who profited from slavery would support a Republican, and the Republican’s would never support Southern policies. And yet in the Democratic Party, one could find Northerners and Southerners supporting similar agendas. Besides, it was the Democratic Party that had time and again orchestrated the greatest compromises in our history whenever slavery had threatened to tear the nation apart. Henry Clay organized and pushed through the Missouri Compromise, laid the foundation for the Compromise of 1850, and Stephen Douglas was then able to secure compromise on Henry Clay’s work. Without the Democrats and that moderating forum of party unity, the American people would have found themselves either divided or forced into a civil war. There were no other parties that could bridge the gap created by the lifestyles of the different regions. Alexis Tocqueville was very keen to note the subtle difference between North and South: “On the north bank of the Ohio everything is activity, industry; labor is honored; there are no slaves. Pass to the south bank and the scene changes so suddenly that you think yourself on the other side of the world the enterprising spirit is gone.”[14] Those differences played havoc with national unity and only the Democratic Party proved astute enough to work as the moderator between the extremes.